QUESTIONS ARISING FROM 77th. MEETING – 28/4/17(the record of earlier meetings can be downloaded from the main Circulus page as can the version of Ciceronis Filius with illustrations added)

​The menu included cicera aromatica (chana masala), carim agnīnum (lamb cury), spīnācia cum caseō, (saag panir), iūs aromaticum lentium (tarka daal ), fragmenta gallīnācea aromatica (chicken tika massala), with the usual pānis Persicus (naan) and orӯza (rice), plus, of course, vīnum rubrum/sanguineum. As normal in a South Asian restaurant we ate with fuscinula (fork) and cochlear (-āris n, table knife) rather than bacillī. The Circulus has for long been using the word furcula for fork but has now discovered that this refers to the massive implements used for buttressing a wall in danger of collapse. As pointed out by Eugene some time ago, the early Jesuits used bacillus (`little stick’) for chopstick, but some neo-Latin authorsuse paxillus ( `little stake, peg’) and this is adopted by the Morgan-Owen lexicon (http://wyomingcatholiccollege.schoolsuite.com/faculty-pages/patrick-owens/lexicon/adumbratio/index.aspx). We will stick with bacillus, both because it seems to be commoner and because paxillus is the scientific term for a poisonous species of mushroom! (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paxillus).

Stella brought along a newly-acquired copy of Latin Grammar by Jesuit scholar, Robert Henle, which forns part of a three-book set for beginning Latin (the other two being First Year Latin and its answer key). Written a few years before Wheelock, Henle’s course is a traditional, grammar-translation one and, though nobody else in the group had used it, the Amazon reviews suggest that analytical learners find it an effective course. As an American publication, it has the cases in the original Roman order (i.e. genitive coming immediately after nominative and accusative between dative and ablative), which can be confusing to those used to the British oner. The latter was an innovation introduced in the 19th century by Charles Kennedy with the intention of placing identical forms (e.g. dative and ablative plural) together for easier memorization.

​ Samuel Johnson, 1709 - 1784

Still on the subject of Latin pedagogy, Tanya had brought along the recent Apple Daily piece by Tom Fung (馮睎乾) - http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/supplement/columnist/art/20170421/19996016 - discussing various Latin phrases and mentioning 夏神父 (Fr. Ha, aka Pater Ludovicus Aestas), John (the Circulus member) and 18th century literary figure 約翰生博士 (Dr. Johnson), the similarity of names between the last two causing momentary confusion to Tanya’s son, Sam. The columnist noted how Johnson, when complimented on his excellent command of Latin put it down to the liberal use of corporal punishment in the leaning process. The extracts from Boswell’s Life of Doctor Johnson that Tanya tracked down made it clear that, whilst he believed the method was taken to an extreme at Lichfield School, Johnson did indeed prefer physical coercion to relying on competition to motivate students:

`Mr. Hunter, the head-master, …'was very severe, and wrong-headedly severe. He used (said he) to beat us unmercifully; and he did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it. He would ask a boy a question; and if he did not answer it, he would beat him, without considering whether he had an opportunity of knowing how to answer it. For instance, he would call up a boy and ask him Latin for a candlestick, which the boy could not expect to be asked. Now, Sir, if a boy could answer every question, there would be no need of a master to teach him.'….. [But] Johnson was very sensible how much he owed to Mr. Hunter. Mr. Langton one day asked him how he had acquired so accurate a knowledge of Latin, in which, I believe, he was exceeded by no man of his time; he said, 'My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing.' … Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod. 'I would rather (said he) have the rod to be the general terrour to all, to make them learn, than tell a child, if you do thus, or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers or sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there's an end on't; whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.'James Boswelll, Life of Johnson, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill, vol.1, pp46-49, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8918/pg8918-images.html

`It is a mistake to think such methods do not work. They work very well for their special purpose. Indeed, I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried on without corporal punishment. The boys themselves believed in its efficacy’

The unspoken premiss is evidently that learning the basics of Latin and Greek is such drudgery that only outright coercion can keep people at it, a belief encapsulated in the old schoolboy rhyme `Latin is a language as dead as dead can be, It killed the ancient Romans and now it’s killing me.’ An indictment, really, of the pedagogical approach rather the language itself.

An imaginative reconstruction of corporal punishment in a Roman school

Turning to more enlightened methods of education, Eugene explained how studying Latin with a Chinese textbook laid the foundation for his command of various other languages, including French and Italian, in both cases mainly acquired through residence in the countries themselves. He also mentioned that Latin Mass can still be heard every Sunday at 12:30pm at Mary Help of Christians Church (inside Tang King Po School, 16 Tin Kwong Road, Ma Tau Wai, Kowloon). He later explained that Circulus members could perhaps join members of Fr Ha's PHIL 2400 Latin class at a Mass on 11 June (Trinity Sunday).

We also discussed the Chinese equivalent of `Jack of all trades, master of none': 周身刀，無張利 ( jau1 san1 dou1,mou4 jeung1 lei6 or (on the Yale system) jāu sān dōu, mòu jēung leih). This means literally `Knives all around the body, no blade sharp’ but Tanya and John prefer the more idiomatic translation `A knife in every pocket but none of them sharp.’

Valerie, who was attending her first meeting, explained that she had originally taught in independent schools in the Uk, then moved to Singapore where she worked for 8 years as a Latin, ancient Greek and also English literature teacher. She has been in Hong Kong for 18 months, teaching mostly from home on Skype. Details of her experience, which includes A-level and Oxbridge entence exams as well as GCSE and Common entrance, as well as testimonials from satisfied cutomers are on her site at http://minervatuition.com/

We talked about a suitable starting place for those wanting to read classics of English literature and suggestions included Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens and Edward Gibbon. There was also mention of Old English, or `Anglo-Saxon’, i.e. English as spoken before the Norman conquest in the 11th century, which was Tolkien’s main academic specialism and a source he drew heavily on when constructing his Middle Earth `legendarium.’ Old English is virtually a foreign language of modern readers, being close to the language’s Germanic roots, highly inflected and without the enormous flood of French and Latin loan words that were later acquired. Forty years ago, this was a compulsory subject for all students of English literature at Oxford, much to the dismay of many undergraduates. Now the subject is still taught but only to those with an interest in it.

Tolkien was particularly interested in the poem Beowulf, in which the hero has to confront Grendel and other monsters(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf). His biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, explains how Tolkien used to being his lectures on the work:

He would come silently into the room, fix the audience with his gaze, and suddenly begin to declaim in a resounding voice the opening lines of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, commencing with a great cry of Hwæt! (The first word of this and several other Old English poems), which some undergraduates took to be "Quiet!" It was not so much a recitation as a dramatic performance, an impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it impressed generations of students because it brought home to them that Beowulf was not just a set text to be read for the purposes of examination, but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien

The monster Grendel from the 2007 film `Beowulf’

John noted that the Old English name for his home town of Nottingham was `Snotengaham’ (the settlement of Snot’s people’). Citizens have reason to be grateful that the intial letter was dropped in the Middle Ages as `snot’ is now the collquial English term for nasal mucus (鼻卑屎). The earliest recorded mention of the name is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, an account of English history started at the courst of King Alfred. This work is easier to understand than Beowulf but still pretty difficult for modern readers:

868 Her for se ilca here innan Mierce to Snotengaham, 7 þær wintersetl namon; 7 Burgræd Miercna cyning 7 his wiotan bædon Æþered b Westseaxna cyning 7 Ælfred his broþur þæt hie him gefultumadonb, þæt hie wiþ þone here gefuhton; 7 þa ferdon hie mid Wesseaxna fierde innan Mierce oþ Snotengaham, 7 þone here þær metton on þam geweorce, 7 þær nan hefelic gefeoht ne wearþ, 7 Mierce friþ namon wiþ þone here;(868 In that year the same[i.eDanish] army went to Snotengaham [i.e. Nottingham] in Mercia [a kingdom in central England] and took up winter quarters there. King Burgred, of Mercia and his council asked Ethered, king of Wessex [the southern English kingdom] and his brother Alfredto help them fight against that army. They entered Mercia with the forces of Wessex and came to Snotengaham where they found the Danes inside the fortress. There was no serious fighting and the Mercians made peace with the invaders.)

We read another five sections of Ciceronis Filius, covering old Roman cures for illnesss and Cicero senior’s house and its furniture. This included mention of morbus rēgius, literally `the royal disease’, which was clearly a term for jaundice in the classical period (see the description of symptoms in Celsus’s De Medicīnā (probably written in the 1st century A.D.), where the alternative name of arquatus is also given – Book III, chap.24, Latin text with linked translation at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/L/Roman/Texts/Celsus/3*.html We did not realise in the meeting that in ecclesiastical Latin morbus rēgius was actually a term for leprosy and also later scrofula. The term was then specifically linked to the belief that scrofula could be cured by the king’s touch, whereas originally it seems to have been coined because treatment in classical times involved the use of luxurious food associated with royal courts (seehttp://gluedideas.com/content-collection/english-cyclopedia/Regius-Morbus.html - but beware of the many typos!). For medieval beliefs and usage, see chapter 3 (`The King’s Evil’) in Frank Barlow’s The Norman Conquest and Beyond (https://books.google.com.hk/books?id=P8c6S8t-Q9oC)

Whilst reading aloud we naturally touched on questions of pronunciation, particularly that of the digraph `ae’ which eventually came to be pronounced like a short `e’ but which most classicists think in Cicero’s time was a diphthong like the `ai’ in modern German `Caesar’, as set out in Sydney Allen’s Vox Latīna. James Adams, who discusses the issue in his Social Variation and the Latin Language (pp.75-78, https://books.google.com.hk/books?id=G-sfAwAAQBAJ) thinks that grammarians tried to maintain the diphthongal pronunciation in educated speech until the 4th century A.D. On the other hand, Oxford philologist Wolfgang de Melo thinks that inscriptional evidence shows that in Rome itself monophthongisation was complete by the end of the 1st century A.D. so that even a writer like Tacitus would probably have pronounced `ae’ as a simple vowel. He rejects, however, the extreme position of Axel Schoenberger (Zur Lautlehre, Prosodie und Phonotaktik des Lateinischen gemäß der Beschreibung Priscians. Millennium, vol. 11 (2014), p.121-184) that the digraph already represented a monophthong when it was adopted by Latin from western Greek alphabets. This all means that we need to be tolerant of both pronunciations but, even though `ae’ did eventually merge with short `e’, it was probably initially a long vowel, even if more open than Latin ē. We should keep the sound long in order to preserve the rhythm of classical poetry, in which `ae’ is always a long vowel.

NOTES[1] collis/mōns Palātīnus (also Palātium): the hill on which Romulus is said to have founded the city and which was an elite residential area under the Republic. Under the Principate the whole area was taken over by the imperial family, hence the derivation from its name of English `palace.’[2] Referring to Marcus Licinius Crassus, reputedly the richest man in Rome, who had been Pompey and Caesar’s ally in the informal `First Triumvirate’ and was to die fighting the Parthians in 53 B.C. Cicero bought the house in 62 B.C., when his son was already 3 years old, for 3.5 million sesterces (see (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/Lazio/Roma/Rome/_Texts/PLATOP*/Domus_Ciceronis.html), going heavily into debt to do so.[3]exquīsitissimō…iūdiciō, ablative of description qualifying virī; invideō, -ēre, -vīdī, -vīsum, envy, be jealous[4]reīpūblicae regendae perītī: `skilled in governing the state’ (literally `of the state being governed’; the Romans preferred this gerundive construction to the gerund with direct object (rempūblicam gerendī), which would be closer to the English idiom[5]permagnō, at a very great price; fateor, -ērī, fassus sum, speak, declare; tantī (genitive of value) so much; cōnstitērunt is perfect of cōnstō, -āre, cost, consist, be agreed) not of cōnsistō, -ere, cōnstitī, cōnstitum, stand together, cease, consist (of)[6] The first sit is subjunctive because it is in a concessive clause with licet (`although’, literally `is permitted’), the second one because it is in a result clause: `[the house] cost me so much that no suburban villa, though it be large and luxurious, is more expensive’; ēmīsisse, to have bought.[7]paenitet, -ēre, -uit, be a cause of regret.